Rev up holiday rewards with your card's shopping portal

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Credit card shopping portals can help you leverage your
holiday spending to give yourself the gift of extra rewards, but it pays to
learn exactly how they work before you shop.

Shopping portals are online gateways offered by some credit
card issuers and loyalty programs that allow you to earn extra rewards points
at designated online retailers.

By going through portals, you can earn double, triple or
even 10 times the points you’d earn using just your rewards card, says
Stephanie Zito, author of Upgrade
Unlocked, a guide to using miles, points and unconventional strategies to
see the world.

Portals are “the easiest and most lucrative way to maximize
point earning” on items you’re already buying, such as decorations, holiday
outfits and gifts, Zito says.

“You can really earn a lot of points around the holidays,”
she says.

How shopping portals
work

Most cardholders have a variety of shopping portal choices
available, including portals from their card issuers, as well as airline
frequent-flyer and hotel loyalty programs.

But how, exactly, do they work? Here are the four steps to
shopping through a portal:

1.Go to the
site.To get to a card’s shopping portal, you have to go to the issuer’s site
or company that owns the portal and enter your login credentials. Commonly used
portals include: Chase’s Ultimate Rewards, available to holders of certain Chase
cards, Barclaycard’s RewardsBoost and Delta’s SkyMiles Shopping.

2.Find the
deal.Once you’ve entered the portal, search for the retailer you want to
shop to see if the portal offers extra points for purchases from that store. For
example, Delta’s portal now offers one mile per dollar spent at Home Depot, one mile per dollar spent at Samsung and three miles per dollar spent at Saks Fifth Avenue.
However, the amount of bonus points offered by portals can and does change
regularly, says Nick Serati, a contributor to ThriftyTraveler.com.

3.Shop as
usual.When you click on the retailer name from the portal, you will be
taken to the retailer’s site, where you shop as you normally would. You must also
use an eligible card from that issuer to make your purchase through a bank portal. However, if you go
through an airline or hotel loyalty program portal, you typically can use any
form of payment, even gift cards, Zito says.

If you make your purchase with a rewards card, even if you
used your card issuer’s portal, your points will get awarded in two batches:
first, your rewards card points and second your bonus points from the portal,
Zito says.

Making the most of
shopping portals

Know the tricks and glitches of shopping portals to make
sure you get the points you’re due and supercharge your earnings. Here are
six tips from portal pros:

1. Pick the right portal.Use the portal
that will give you the best bang for your buck and that fits in with your
overall rewards earning strategy, Serati says.

If you’re making a big purchase,
check rewards comparison sites such as Evreward.com to see which portals
offer the most points for the retailer you plan to shop, Serati recommends.

If
you plan to buy a MacBook, for example, you could type in Apple and see that
you’d get 5 percent cash back through Discover Deals or 2 percent cash back through
the Citi Bonus Cash Center.

Always double-check at the portal because comparison
sites sometimes make errors, Zito says. “But they’re a good starting point,”
she says.

“You get a little double-dip action..”

2.Look for special deals.Shopping portals offer holiday bonus points and special discounts this time of year.

For example, United Airline’s MileagePlus portal has a special offering 500 bonus miles when you spend $150, 2,500 bonus miles when you spend $750 and 5,000 bonus miles when you spend $1,500 through November 19.

Portals also typically offer deals on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Memorial Day
and other holidays, as well as Thanksgiving through New Year’s. “They tend to
have these deals anytime stores would have sales,” Zito says.

3.Make a smooth transaction.It’s
important to complete your transaction correctly or you could lose a slew of
bonus points.

For example, AJ Saleem, who works for a tutoring company in
Houston, lost out on 5 points per dollar when going through the Discover portal
to buy a $1,500 MacBook Pro at Apple.com.

“I had a couple of tabs open
comparing the different models,” he explains. He accidentally clicked a tab he
hadn’t arrived at by going through the portal, and didn’t realize his mistake
until the 7,500 bonus points failed to appear in his account.

To avoid this problem,
shop around first and decide exactly what you want to buy. Then close all
windows open on your computer and open a new one to go through the portal to
the retailer, Zito recommends. Don’t get up and walk away from your device or
refresh the screen during the purchase.

4.Track your bonuses.Whenever you make a
purchase through a portal, record the transaction, including which portal you
used, the purchase date, the merchant name, the purchase amount and your order
or confirmation number. Check your account periodically to make sure your
points post, which can take six to eight weeks.

Even if you did everything
right, you can hit a glitch. For example, Serati once almost didn’t get his
bonus points for buying a pair of Bose headphones through the Chase
portal.

He called Chase. “I said I’m 99
percent sure I did go through the portal,” he says. Chase was able to verify
that he did click through the portal, and they awarded him the points. “Chase
did work with me on that,” he says.

5. Maximize your points.There are tricks
you can use to pile up even more points, Zito says.

For example, say you want
to buy a $1,000 MacBook and you have a Chase Ink Cash business card that offers you 5 percent cash back at office supply stores. You can buy Apple gift cards
from an office supply store using your credit card to get 5 percent cash back.

Then
you can visit an airline portal that offers, say, 2 points per dollar on
purchases from Apple.com. Because it’s an airline portal rather than a credit
card issuer portal, you should be able to use the gift cards to check out.

First,
check the fine print to make sure the use of gift cards is OK, Zito says. “You
get a little double-dip action,” she says.

6.Get in the portal habit.It’s easy to just
start shopping online and forget to use your card’s portal. “I even forget
sometimes,” Zito says.

As a reminder, consider setting a portal as your home
page, she recommends. Even if you’re an in-person shopper, you can buy an item
online from your phone while you’re standing in the store and use the
pick-up-in-store option, Zito says.

One man Zito featured in her book remodeled
his bathroom by buying Lowe’s gift cards with his Chase Ink Business card (Chase has replaced this card with the Chase Ink Business Preferred card) at an
office supply store to get 5 points per dollar. He then went through a portal
to shop online at Lowe’s to get another 5 points per dollar spent. He picked up
the items at his local store.

“They’d be there waiting for him, so he didn’t
have to shop,” Zito says. He spent $10,000 on the remodel, and he got enough points
to take his family to Hawaii. “He’d have earned 0 points had he just written a
check to his contractor,” she says.

If you use a portal every time you shop this holiday season
and maximize your rewards in every way possible, you also might earn enough to
buy a ticket somewhere warm to de-stress after the holidays.

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